Why A Website Audit Is a Need of Your Business
Similar to how your vehicle requires an Inspection, the health of your website might degrade over time if it is not serviced correctly.
Unfortunately, many webmasters will wait until visible adverse effects on your website before realizing that a website audit is necessary.
Again, much like with your car, discovering and correcting problems with your website saves money on future maintenance and assures maximum performance.
Website Audits and Their Importance
The goal of a website audit is to provide webmasters with a comprehensive and extensive examination of their site’s health, performance, and speed.
Assessing these areas will provide you with a complete picture of your site’s present performance, show you where you may be able to further optimize and enhance your site – and uncover concerns that may be causing harm to your site’s health.
Website Audits Come in a Variety of Forms
A website audit, in general, is a thorough examination of the aspects that influence a website’s visibility to search engines and convenience of use to visitors. However, a comprehensive website audit is not always required. Below are the most popular types of audits, as well as recommendations from our experts on when you might need one.
Technical Audit
While solid quality content and backlinks may help your site rank, all of your efforts may be for naught if there is a technical issue. Technical audits focus on best practices for site visibility and verifying that all websites fulfill search engine crawling and indexing standards.
SEO Audit
An SEO audit determines how well your website is optimized for search by examining keywords, link profiles, traffic behavior, goal conversions, metadata, and image and video optimization.
An SEO audit assesses how effectively your website is optimized for search by examining keywords, link profiles, traffic behavior, goal conversions, metadata, and picture and video optimization. There will also be other technological components that must be audited.
Content Audit
While content is frequently assessed as part of an SEO audit, stand-alone content audits may also be informative, providing significant insights into what messaging and tone of voice are converting and what aren’t.
UX (user experience audit), backlink audit, code/markup audit, social media audit, conversion rate audit (CRO), competition audit, or Google Analytics audit are some of the smaller, more specific audits.
Why do your websites need an Audit?
Your Conversion Rates Are Low
Increasing conversion rates is critical for every business. A website audit will scrutinize your crucial landing pages, including their content, design, and even calls-to-action, to ensure that they maximize conversions. This is not a simple process, and it might take months to figure out what works best for your website. An SEO audit for your website, on the other hand, will enhance your ROI through strategic planning, research, and testing.
Your users are unable to navigate your website properly
When you’re looking at your website all day, every day, it’s easy to ignore any issues a user may have. The following are common characteristics of difficult-to-navigate websites:
- Too many items in the navigation bar – rather than putting all of your services in the top menu, attempt to organize them properly in dropdowns – restrict the number of tabs in your main menu.
- Overlinking — visitors should not be required to click more than three times to reach their chosen page. This is also true for search engines, which are less inclined to crawl difficult-to-reach pages.
- Every page should indicate how to return to the homepage (clickable logo etc.).
- On the homepage, the material is abundant, which dilutes essential information.
- There is no search option (critical for e-commerce websites).
- It is difficult to reach you – consider social symbols, a phone number that can be clicked on a mobile device, an exact address, and an email address.
• Before your user has even gotten beyond the site, a full-screen ‘sign up now’ pop-up appears.
As part of your audit, user testing is an efficient way to ensure your website is user-friendly. It often entails people recording their screens and completing defined ‘tasks’ on your website and providing feedback on the process – for example, ‘go to the blog’ or ‘buy X item.’
Your website isn’t well-optimized
Conducting an SEO Audit is a complex process. This includes a wide range of issues that may be identified and corrected by a site audit. Basic inspections include:
- Content optimization opportunities – thin, meaningless content will need to be updated, redirected, or removed.
- Images that have not been correctly categorized are how search engines determine what the image is.
- HTTP / HTTPS — detecting any concerns with mixed material on the page.
- Issues with metadata — ensuring that all pages contain unique and appropriate metadata.
- Headers – Ensuring that H1s, H2s, and H3s are used correctly across the site.
- Mobile responsiveness — because mobile traffic increasingly outnumbers desktop traffic, you must ensure that your site works correctly on mobiles and tablets.
- URL structures — Ensuring that all of your pages have appropriate URL structures.
- Indexability is the process of ensuring that all relevant pages on your website are indexable and preventing those that do not need to be indexed, such as a ‘thank you’ page.
- Duplicate content – Locate and correct any pages with similar or identical material.
- Broken links – internal and external 404 errors are fixed/redirected.
Your website is at risk of being penalized by search engines
Some established websites may have participated in or worked with SEO agencies that used “Black Hat” SEO practices in the past, such as link farming, keyword stuffing, cloaking, or similar.
All of these strategies may have worked to boost ranks and traffic at the time, but websites that used them may now face penalties from search engines as their algorithms are updated over time.
A site audit can discover and repair anything that could lead to a penalty before it happens, or it can correct the reason for a penalty if the site already has one.
Your Website Content Is Not Improved Over Time
A technical site audit will examine essential factors such as bounce rates, page visits, time on site, and much more. These critical areas must be improved to ensure better search engine indexing. Because of the high quality of the material you give, search engines and users return to your website regularly. Auditing your material lets, you learn about the sorts of content customers enjoy and how they prefer to consume it, such as video, photos, and words. You can quickly develop a robust content plan for your blog and website with the help of an audit. Your visitors will receive entertaining and helpful content, which will result in a higher organic position on search engines.
You Need to Identify Online Trends
Visitor patterns are one of the most critical and quick insights you will obtain from a complete website audit. Picks and valleys can be tracked in hourly, weekly, or even monthly traffic. This is critical since it will assist you in gaining a better knowledge of consumer behavior. This way, you may deliver material like-new goods, email marketing, and blog articles to the appropriate channels in a planned manner.
Your website is taking an excessive amount of time to load
People are impatient; if your website takes more than 5 seconds to load, you will likely observe a higher bounce rate, fewer pages per session, and a greater cart abandonment rate for e-commerce sites.
According to Google’s study, increasing the page load time from 1 second to 3 seconds raises the bounce rate by 32%. If it is increased to 6 seconds, the bounce rate increases by 106%.
More significantly, Google understands that people are lazy and has indicated that site speed is a ranking factor, which means that sites that take longer to load may be pushed down in the SERPS.
You may evaluate your site performance with Google’s Page Speed Tool, which will provide you with information about your website’s current degree of optimization.
In May 2021, Google’s new page experience ranking factor used Core Web Vitals, a unique collection of speed, responsiveness, and visual stability measures.
The Most Common Causes of Slow Loading Speed
During an audit, the most typical causes of excessive site speed will be detected, which frequently include:
- Formatting and compressing photos correctly (think of those 2MB images cooped up on your blog posts).
- Reducing the number of redirects increases the number of HTTP requests and slows down the load time.
- Minifying JS and CSS files by removing superfluous characters and CSS comments.
- Examine the number of plugins on your site – one for all you plugin addicts out there.
You Wish to Examine Your Competitors
Knowing what online methods your rivals are doing is critical to being competitive, and a decent site audit should involve some degree of competition analysis.
This will begin with identifying your primary rivals (if you don’t already know who they are) and performing a small audit on them, which will include their content, social activities, targeted keywords, backlinks, and organic / paid search activity.
Analyzing your competition provides you with the knowledge you need to know where you stand in contrast to them, allowing you to change and enhance your online approach if that is what it takes to become more successful than them.
How Often Should a Site Audit Be Performed?
A regular, planned audit serves as a standard for future improvements and guarantees that serious faults that will create difficulties in the future are identified and corrected.
We propose a yearly audit for small websites, and for more significant websites, we recommend a bi-annual audit. In addition, when a site is online, a site audit should be performed to address any urgent faults and speed up the rate at which the site gets indexed.
Why Pay for an Audit When You Can Get One for Free Online?
You’re probably aware that a quick Google search for ‘free website audit’ yields a plethora of free audit tools – there’s no harm in using these tools, but they’re far less effective than a proper audit.
Returning to the automobile analogy, if a warning light appears on your dashboard, the budding mechanic inside you performs some research and effectively diagnoses the problem, but you’d still take it to a skilled technician to fix, right?
Furthermore, what if the warning light on your dashboard has malfunctioned or is displaying a generic warning for various issues?
So, while these online audits are often free and provide a pretty accurate high-level view into your website’s performance, they are generic, simplistic, and can be deceptive or confusing to someone who does not have the experienced help to correctly address any faults they uncover.
Feeling overwhelmed? Don’t Worry!
Site audits are incredibly beneficial, but they take time and require expert direction to be effective. If you believe it’s time for your site to be serviced, or if you’ve witnessed a significant reduction in traffic and rankings, we can assist. We recognize that no two site audits are the same, so we’ll personalize yours to your specific needs.
Our comprehensive SEO audit contains more than 150 tests that look at variables such as technical analysis, site architecture, security, image optimization, mobile, on-page, backlinks, keywords, content, user experience, and more.
Click here to consult our team about your website and SEO audit services. Fill out the form, and we will reach out to you. It’s that simple!
